1948
by allan
Summary: A dystopic author is reprieved, at the cost of freedom.


     It was the Isle of Jura, threshold to the Inner Hebrides, and even in early autumn no place for a man with weak lungs.  The haar, an enveloping sea mist and cold as charity, would steal the breath from a corpse.  Like a gas attack it was oozing towards a lone figure stranded on the empty, unmade road with his rapidly cooling motorcycle.  It turned day into twilight.

     The tall, gaunt man in a trench coat straightened up with a sigh.  He ran big-knuckled fingers through a shock of brown hair, and rolled himself a cigarette.  The man coughed painfully, but whether it was the coarse shag or the bone-chilling fog was hard to tell.      

     The man stared at his silent machine with the resigned pessimism of the non-mechanical.  He frowned, the line on his forehead a counterpoint to the pencil-thin, military mustache that over-scored his upper lip, and prepared to start pushing.  Abruptly he stopped and listened.  Heavy footsteps on loose gravel from the direction of Ardlussa, the way he'd just come and without passing a soul.

     The frigid ectoplasm parted, and a shape emerged.  A big, bearded man in leather pea-jacket and sea boots strode forth, then stopped, regarding the unlucky rider.  He wasn't one of the local fishermen nor, despite the dark glasses that lent a disquieting illusion of hollow sockets, apparently blind.

     "I heard your engine falter," the apparition observed. "It's a Rudge, isn't it?"

     "Yes," wheezed the surprised rider, in a voice too small for his frame.  "I suppose it must be that rotten Pool petrol, and I just filled it with my last coupons too."

     "It's not for want of fuel."  The big man walked up and loomed over the bike like it was a toy.  "It's the spark that's missing."  

     He bent down and removed the magneto cap, though how he could see anything through those lenses was beyond the owner.  A folding knife was produced and the points tutted over as he scraped and re-set them.  A hand the size of a bunch of pre-war pork 'bangers' descended on the pedal, and the Rudge roared into willing life.

     "Good show!" exclaimed the rider, throwing away his dog-end and holding out a hand.  "I'm Eric, better with gardens and rabbits than mechanical things I'm afraid."

     They shook.  A peasant's hand, thought Eric, feeling the calluses.  Toil-imprinted the world over.

     "Call me Arch," the giant rumbled.  "It will do for now."

     Eric looked at the weather-beaten face framed in a riot of tousled jet curls.  Class recognition was instinctual, but he couldn't quite place Arch. 

     "Bird-watching is it?" he asked politely.  "I hope you're not a laird's gillie come to ensure the poor crofters aren't dining on venison."

     A quick smile revealed teeth the size and colour of old piano keys.  

     "Only birds I watch are the ostrich-feather variety," laughed Arch.  "And I'd as soon see peasants feast on the rich, as innocent red deer."  He shrugged.  "You might say I'm a rover that has set his back to modern times."

     Eric felt a twinge of sympathy; he'd been down-and-out himself in Paris and London.  He may have seen few tramps as big and burly as this one while living in the 'spikes'; but Eric had been a policeman too, and caught no whiff of the footpad.  He had an idea.  

     "Are you interested in a spot of employment?"  Traveling agricultural labourers remained a tradition of mutual necessity in remote areas of Scotland.  The war hadn't helped.

     "I'm not afraid of honest toil," Arch stated proudly.  "Do it for nothing if I could live off the air."

     "Well," said Eric.  "I can't offer much more than food and lodging, but I could use a hand."  He pushed the bike off its stand.  "Look, my farm at Barnhill is the only place within ten miles.  How about I give you a lift and we talk about it there over a cuppa?"

     Arch's thick forefinger traced the faded gilt lettering on the ebony tank.  "Better Rudge it than trudge it, I suppose."

     The engine laboured under the unaccustomed load and Eric feared for his threadbare rear tyre--replacements were virtually unobtainable.  They talked in snatches punctuated by grunts as the suspension bottomed.

     Eric explained his convalescent condition, and the tasks he'd hoped to complete while his young adopted son was staying with friends.  Most of all, however, he needed time to write. 

     Arch was familiar with the coastal rituals of peat-cutting, milking, keeping the roe deer out of kitchen gardens and fat-tailed lobsters trapped in the creel.  He volunteered little of himself.  Eric pegged him for one of the 'forgotten men', ex-warriors with the memory of civvie-street blown out of them.  Lost in a world as much changed by the war against fascism as they themselves, there was no place for the inner wounded.

     Outdistancing the fog, they rode across the moors, through fields of ripening oats, and finally up the drive to a somewhat forbidding farmhouse.  Scottish-built to endure, rather than charm. However it was dirt-cheap to rent, possessing neither electricity nor telephone.  The nearest shop was more than twenty miles away, the nearest doctor thirty.  Eric loved it.

     With the Rudge silenced, there was no sound of man save the crunch of their boots.  Jurra was a hard, remote place not much humbled by human hand.

     "Why don't I put on the kettle and make us that drop of tea?" suggested Eric.  "If you like it strong, I'm afraid we're both out of luck."

     Arch rummaged inside his jacket and produced a battered quarter pound of Ty-Phoo Tips.  

     "Companeros share and share alike," he said, handing over the treasure. "Now, show me where you keep your tools.  I'll have that rusty rear chain adjusted and oiled before the kettle boils."

     Eric got busy in the kitchen, happy to have his favourite brand available again.  Eric liked tea same as his beer; strong, bitter, and dark.  At six heaped teaspoons to the pot his two- ounce allotment was soon gone.  He took every opportunity to trade his sugar to coffee drinkers for their tea ration.  Eric had little room for sweeteness in his life.  Still, bread was just off the coupon and his industrious companion could probably manage a couple of thick 'doorsteps', the tramp term for a generous sandwich.

     The sun had come out and through the scullery window he could hear the clatter of tools, then Arch singing softly to himself.  But it wasn't a snatch of 'Buttons and Bows' or similar popular ditty, it wasn't even in English.

     "Viva la quinto Brigada..." Arch sang, drumming fingers on the tyre.  "...humbala, humbala, hum-ba-la."

     Eric listened, frozen in time, while Arch finished oiling the chain; the song had taken him back ten years to Catalonia and the Spanish Civil War.  Then the kettle's irritated hissing recalled him to his duties as a host, but the insistent rhythm stayed in his head.

     Arch had to stoop to enter.  Eric was six foot three and forever beating his brains against obdurately low-brow Scottish lintels, yet even he had to look up to meet those impenetrable lenses.  They seemed to take everything in, but give so little out.  However, questions could come later; for now jackets were placed over chair backs as tea and robust sandwiches were addressed.

     Afterwards, Eric looked across his saucer at Arch.  He blew the hot brew to a temperature of his liking, then forced himself to meet the mystery man's eyes.   

     "Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista," he stated; it came out almost a challenge.  The POUM fighters were neither Stalinist nor even really Trotskyite, which probably explained why almost everyone stabbed them in the back at the first opportunity.

     "Confederacion Nacional de Tradajadores," replied Arch, smiling broadly.  The CNT anarchists knew betrayal better than most. They both might have even fought back-to-back and never known it.  He reached across the table and grasped Eric by the wrist in the old revolutionary greeting.

     "I was on the Aragon front in '37," Eric squeaked excitedly, reaching for his shag and papers.  "Stopped one in the throat at Huesca.  Thought I was a goner, but all I lost was my voice."  He looked sympathetically into his companion's smoke-filtered spectacles.  "Was it their damnable gas that got you?"

     "My eyes?"  Arch laughed.  "Oh no.  It'd take more than their stink and smoke to blind me to the truth."  He unhooked the wire arms and placed his glasses on the table.

     Eric started up, almost upsetting the tea-things.  

     "My God, you've got no eyes!" he exclaimed.  

     Where flesh should have been was only glittering blackness--like looking straight down two pit seams with no end to them.  Eric was familiar with war's atrocities and the deep-sunk eyes of hunger, but he'd never stared into such fathomless wells of horror.  This man wasn't simply blind--he simply wasn't possible.

     "All the better to see you with," guffawed Arch.  "Remember you called poor prime-minister Baldwin 'a hole in the air'?  Just consider these holes in reality, and don't ask me to explain."  He reached into his coat.  "Which brings me to the real reason I'm here."

     Eric froze over his half-rolled cigarette, was this how Trotsky felt just before the ice-pick?

      Arch pulled a large hunting flask from an inner pocket and slopped a generous measure into both their tea cups.  

     "Drink up," he advised.  "That way you'll have something to blame in the morning."

     Eric's voice came squeakier than usual.  "W...who are you?"

     "Try what," suggested Arch unhelpfully.

     "You mean you're not human?" whispered his companion.

     "Oh, I wear the meat well enough I suppose," grumbled Arch.  "Nevertheless, strictly speaking I'm the Spirit of...Freedom, I suppose.  Of Christmas Never-Bloody-Was."

     "Then you weren't in Spain?"

     "Damn right I was," Arch protested.  "Killed there too; once to my face by the fascists, once in the back by the commies.  Finally, I guess, of a broken heart.  Bullets were easier."  He raised his tea cup.  "And yet it's the likes of you makes it worth while coming back for more."  He reached over and clicked cups. "Cheers!"  

     Numbly Eric drank, then gasped as the liquor grabbed his throat.  

     "W...what the hell was that?" he demanded.

     "Usque baugh," Arch said blandly, tossing his back.  "Water of Life; wild, wet, and willing--better than that new-fangled streptomycin the sawbones have been giving you.  Believe me you'll need it if you're ever going to finish writing 'Last Man in Europe'."

     Eric gaped.  "How do you know about...?"

     "Look, Eric," Arch snapped impatiently.  "I'm Anarkhaos, the first principle of sentient life.  Freedom-bloody-personified.  I always tell people what they don't want to hear, what they think nobody knows."

     Eric took another swallow and shook his head.  "I don't believe any of this."  His fingers found relief in the familiar ritual of roll and light, his lungs in the pleasure and pain of a deeply-needed drag.

     "That's what they all say," grumbled Arch as he toyed with the cheap butter knife.  "This part of a set?"

     "Huh?"  Eric looked at him absently.  "No, we pawned the family silver years ago."

     Arch plunged the knife into his 'eye' almost to the hilt, then winked.  He passed it to Eric.  The metal handle was frosted, chilled as if drawn from a block of ice.  The blade was quite gone leaving only a cleanly incised edge; like the bite of tiny diamond teeth.    

     That was high-carbon Sheffield steel, Eric had time to think before Arch took the remains from his hand, and calmly fed it into the other eye.

     "Not much of a trick," Arch said deprecatingly," but I can't be arsed with pulling another resurrection.  Besides, they bloody well hurt--one masochist to another.  Now, can we get back to the writing?"

     Eric gulped down his laced tea and didn't object to a refill of both.  Now he came to notice, his smoke was being sucked in a slow spiral towards those hungry eyes.  He found himself recalling being caught by the local maelstrom when lobster-potting the previous year, and shuddered.

     "Are you some kind of a muse?" he asked, feeling decidedly foolish.

     "No, I'm not amused at all." Arch grunted irritably.  "Do I look like I cavort around in nappies?  I'm Anarch, the absence of rule, the essence of awareness.  Cogito ergo-friggin-sum."  

     He slapped a shovel-sized palm down on the table.  "Dammit Eric, do you believe in me?  I'm the French peasants who downed scythes and raised their fists to salute your train full of volunteers heading south to the Pyrenees and death.  I'm the handshake of that doomed young Italian anarchist you met in Barcelona, the writing on their brothel wall 'Please treat the women as comrades'."

     He loomed over Eric, filling the room with his menacing presence.  "Oh, you've plenty of daft ideas: anti-birth control, queer-fear, treating your body like it's immortal--not to mention a closet love of the military.  But kidding yourself that you're not one of mine---well!  Any fool can see where your heart really lies."

     "And where's that?" ventured Eric, more concerned now as to where he'd laid his shotgun.

     "The proles.  You're a champion of the working Brit, the bloody St.George of golden Albion.  From your saucy Donald McGill seaside postcard collection to that wretched apology for tobacco you smoke.  You're the salt on all those lick-spittle slugs--what did you call the Russian commissars, 'half-gangster, half-gramophone'?  I liked that."

     Eric coloured in embarrassment, always uncomfortable with direct praise.  "But why are you here?"

     Arch snorted.  "You're dying of T.B. in the sleet-pissing Hebrides after barely making it alive through the worst winter since eighteen ninety-four...Ha!  And you ask me why I'm here?  To make sure you live long enough to finish your great work, of course."

     "My novel-in-progress isn't all that good..." Eric began.

     "No, it's a curate's egg," Arch interrupted irritably.  "Like you said about Dickens, 'rotten architecture...magnificent gargoyles'.  Nevertheless your dystopic vision towers over petty flaws like its Ministries over men.  Conrad's Kurtzian horror has nothing on the betraying of love to the sewer rat's fangs, the eternal boot to the face that kisses it."  

     Arch's terrible sockets bulged like righteous rage found audience.  "Yet ordinary people will figure it sure as two 'n two makes four and truth is always the truth.  The Jarrow hunger marchers, General Strike workers sold out by their own T.U.C., our 'forgotten men'; they may lose everything, but not the evidence of their own eyes.  Labouring men the world over will read and be wiser to the lies that seek to bind them."

     "But my poor effort is only the fiction of a future, not a manifesto." protested Eric.  "I can't even get some bits of it right.  It's just that..."

     "...that you must write it." Arch concluded for him.  "It is by calling the devil his true name that he may be banished.  All it takes is for one urchin to show that the emperor has no clothes, or balls for that matter."

     "I've never been afraid to tell the truth," admitted Eric.  "Leastways, as I see it.  But I doubt emperors, satanic or otherwise, pay much heed."

     Arch grinned hugely.  "They're going to pay through the nose, the stink your book will raise.  That over-cooked cabbage reek is an olfactory evocation of every ersatz short-changing and cruel deception that has affronted the working man."  He spread paw-like hands.  "You can't preach people into doing the right thing; most times you have to scare the living bejeesus out of them."

     Eric was glad of his strong India tea and that liquor, though almost tasteless, was most potent.  He certainly hoped he was drunk.

      Pink elephants next, he thought glumly, looking at the great brute across from him.  Eric recalled an night of whisky-fuelled orations with Hemingway back in Spain.  There was a distinct resemblance to Arch, however even Ernesto wasn't this gung-ho and full of himself.

     Eric never really had time to think about the supernatural, the real world was bad enough.  Despite that, he was convinced this wasn't just some monstrous prank or that he'd suddenly gone mad.  Perhaps Arch's strange liquor might have been drugged, although it was unlike any effect he'd seen in India or Burma.  He'd heard that T.B. could cause hallucinations, but always dismissed that as the ravings of consumptive poets on laudanum. 

     So, he believed this was happening.  But did he believe in Arch, Freedom, or for that matter, Life itself?  There wasn't much worth really believing in about life, yet anarchists retained the most wildly optimistic expectations of their fellow man.  Death now, he'd seen enough to firmly believe in that.  Death was undeniably all too real.

     Just then, Arch cupped a massive hand to his ear.  "Punctual as ever," he muttered.

     Eric stared at him, and then he heard it too.  There was a distant roar, and coming closer by the minute.

     "My ride, I'm afraid," Arch announced, with a grimace.  "Sorry about all the other jobs.  Still, at least your bike will last a bit longer and so will you."  He handed Eric his silver flask, it was full again.  "Hang on to this, the best medicine for man's ills is a drop of distilled freedom."  

     Arch got his jacket and they went outside.  The sound of an abused engine was much nearer, almost upon them.  "I hope she knows about the front brake," he grumbled.  "There isn't one."

     "She?"  Eric's question was answered as a rangy black motorcycle burst into the yard with screeching tyres and a screeching rider.

     A young woman sawed desperately at the bars and skidded on the cobbles, centre-punching the stone horse trough.  She flew through the air and impacted heavily against the farmhouse wall.

     Eric rushed over, Arch following at a more leisurely pace.  The crumpled shape lay in a small pile of cracked wall harling.  She wasn't moving.

     "My God!" Eric shouted.  "She's dead, and no more than a schoolgirl."  

     Indeed she was dressed a bit like one.  Thin black-stockinged legs sticking out from one of those short tunics favoured by residential establishments.

     Arch strode past him and prodded the inert form with the toe of his boot.  

     "Not dead," he corrected.  "Death."  

     Another, less gentle kick.  

     "C'mon, scaring the life out of Eric doesn't count."

     Death jumped to her feet with a pout.  

     "Not fair." she complained.  "You're the one who's been slipping him elixir."

     Eric's jaw dropped.  She looked far more classically tubercular than him; that characteristic pallor, the dark-rimmed eyes and nervous energy.  The aura of...Death.  Eric felt a simultaneous attraction and repulsion he felt powerless to resist.

     "Don't mind me, Eric," she said, turning to smile winningly at him.  "It's not your turn right now."

     "No," Arch grumbled.  "It's me she's come for--again."

     "See, no rush," Death assured Eric.  Somehow that didn't make him feel much better.

     Arch was busy straightening out his bike's front end with much muffled expletives.  Finally satisfied, he wheeled it over still muttering about "...the Favoured putting their spoke in the wheel of Liberty again."

     Eric stared, and this time at the motorcycle.  He recognised it as one of those monster S.S.100 Broughs poor T.E.Lawrence used to thrash around on, however this brute was stripped to the bone. It also appeared to have a supercharger fitted, which of course was insane.  He looked from the bike to Arch, then at Death.  It was all so ludicrous, he couldn't help but laugh.

     "That's the spirit," Arch encouraged.  "She needs to hear more humans laugh in her face.  Easy for Death to get stuck-up what with everyone on their knees begging, offering anything for five minutes more."

     "Don't listen to Anarch," she bantered back.  "He's my most regular customer; always losing lives, losing all those brave revolutions."

     "All revolutions fail," quoted Arch, with a wink to Eric.  "But it's not the same failure." 

      He straddled the machine and gestured for Death to hop on behind.  "And as long as there is pundonor, cojones; there is hope yet for Liberty."

     Death tittered.  "Doesn't he go on?"  She snuggled up to the hirsute giant.  "But he's such a cuddly old bear, and he's put so much business my way.  Why, half the crazy things people do to each other are because of him."

     Arch came down on the kick starter and the big Brough roared into eager life, its forced induction a low moan of anticipation.

     "B...but," stammered Eric.  "You're just taking off?  What am I meant to do now?"

     "Why, write for your life, silly boy."  Death made a moue.  "Do you think I'll wait for ever?"

     Arch blipped the throttle.  "You were meant to burst a blood vessel in your lung pushing the Rudge through that haar.  I decided your work was more important.  I'm not meant to interfere with Death or Necessity, some rules even Freedom must obey."  He shrugged.  "I knew she'd find my bike, put two and two together to make four."

     "Three, five--whatever I will of most mortals, they'll say just about anything for me.  Not you, Eric.  You are a man with a mission."  Death smiled hugely, cheekbones stretching her skin almost transparent over sharp little teeth.  "I like the brave ones."   

     Eric paled, but he knew his duty.  "You can see I must finish the story."

     Death turned to him, her face suddenly formal as a geisha's.

     "I see everything, Eric.  You are the dead."   

     She reached around Arch to goose the throttle, making the 'charger wail like a banshee.  

     "Isn't life wonderful?" she squealed.  "I can't seem to get enough of it."

     "Okay," Arch muttered, tightening his jaw.  "I guess this means your place again."

     "And I've a hundred and one rooms for naughty boys," Death said sternly, throwing a wink at the non-plussed Eric.  "He loves it really."

     Arch shrugged, and crunched the Brough into gear.  

     "We have our bit of fun and then, all too soon, it's over," he grumbled.  "You see, Eric, the one everybody has be watching over their shoulder for is Big Sister."


End file.
